EDITOR’S NOTE: Warhead was on the CBS Late Movie on August 24, 1977 and May 11, 1978 as Prisoner in the Middle.
Warhead (also known as Prisoner in the Middle, Sabra Command and Mission Overkill) is a 1977 geopolitical drama shot in Israel back in 1973. It was directed by John O’Connor in his sole directing credit and produced and written by Buddy Ruskin, the man who brought us The Mod Squad, alongside co-writers Patrick Foulk and Donovan Karnes.
The plot kicks off with a bang when terrorists blow up a school bus in the Middle East, leaving Lt. Liora (Bond girl Karin Dor, looking entirely too glamorous for a massacre) as the sole survivor. She identifies Palestinian Major Malouf (David Semadar) as the mastermind, and man, watching this movie nearly fifty years later really makes you realize that some cinematic conflicts outlast empires, VCRs and basic human patience. Liora teams up with rugged commando Ben-David (Christopher Stone) to cross the border and seek poetic, lead-filled justice.
Meanwhile, U.S. Air Force Colonel Tony Stevens—played by a visibly exhausted, pre-fatigue-era David Janssen with the world-weary swagger of a man who just wants a martini—gets unceremoniously dropped into the desert to disarm a loose nuclear bomb that apparently just fell out of an American plane like a set of keys between couch cushions. Malouf snags the nuke, Stevens bumps into Liora, and the movie pivots into a heavy-handed lesson on how humanity might actually be worth saving right before everyone gets unceremoniously wiped out except for Stevens. Nothing quite screams feel-good cinema like a bleak existential crisis wrapped in dusty 70s exploitation aesthetics.
Look, the film boasts glorious cinematic treasures like Art Metrano popping up as a soldier and a nuclear warhead prop that looks like a rejected oversized suppository from the Batmobile. It’s cheap, it’s clumsy, it’s historically fascinating for all the wrong reasons.
Watch it on YouTube.
